Went and saw the Francis Alÿs show at Tate Modern yesterday. Highly recommend it. Such honest, poignant and beautiful work. Video art rarely grabs my attention but I spent a long time with these works and will go back.

When Faith Moves Mountains

'Alÿs visited Lima in 2000 just before the collapse of the Fujimori government and found 'a desperate situation that called for an "epic response", at once futile and heroic, absurd and urgent.' He returned in 2002 to organise When Faith Moves Mountains, persuading 500 Peruvian students to walk in a line up a sand dune on the outskirts of the city, digging as they went, thus displacing the dune by a few centimetres. The action – Alÿs's most visually spectacular to that date – was filmed from various positions and the images were subsequently used on postcards, whilst the artist also encouraged the spread of news of the work through rumour and myth.

Here the 'making of' video is presented. The miniscule and temporary movement of the dune seems to dramatise a principle of 'Maximum Effort, Minimal Result' that typifies many Latin American modernisation schemes, yet it was also a monumental achievement made by communal co-operation. For Alÿs it was essential that the participants gave their time and effort for free so that the action could stand as a model for a lavish expenditure of energy, running counter to conservative economic principles of efficiency and production.'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Ty4TTAX48
'Alÿs has always taken an interest in the ways in which performances are repeated and re-staged. For Re-enactments 2000 he walked into a gun shop, bought a weapon, and carried it very visibly until he was arrested. The next day, somewhat implausibly, he persuaded the police to take part in a reconstruction of the exact same events. The work exposes the fallacious idea that any performance can be known to us with pure immediacy and without mediation, yet it also points to the violence in Mexico City in a way that Alÿs has sometimes felt was too sensational.'

Fri Jul 16, 2010 4:40 am

crash

Joined: 07 Aug 2003
Posts: 5457
Location: the chocolate city with a marshmallow center and a graham cracker crust of corruption

Inedible Condiment wrote: Kese, I REALLY love that picture of the kid in the wheat field.